Mob boss: "I Killed JFK."

From www.nationalenquirer.com.

“YEAH, I had the son of a bitch killed. I’m glad I did. I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself!”

With those words, a Mafia kingpin confessed to orchestrat­ing the November 1963 assassination ofPresident John F. Kennedy. And now, on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s tragic death, The ENQUIRER can finally reveal the blockbuster truth be­hind the crime that shocked the world!

The government’s version is that lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswaldfired three shots to kill the president as he rode with wife Jackie in a motorcade through the packed Dallas streets. But after decades of debate and doubt, The ENQUIRER has uncovered the astonishing story of World War II Army veteran Jack Van Laningham, who risked his life as part of an FBI plot to uncover the REAL story of the assassination.

Now 84, Van Laningham joined the military in 1946 and served brave­ly in Japan and Vietnam. He was stationed in England in 1963 when he heard about the Kennedy assassina­tion. At the time, he never could have imagined he’d be sharing a jail cell with the man behind the murder.

Van Laningham’s life began to unravel in the mid-1980s after he returned to the U.S. and his marriage collapsed. Broke, desperate and intoxi­cated in 1984, he robbed a Bradenton, Fla., bank using a laundry bag and TV remote, pretending he had a bomb. He turned himself in two weeks later and was sentenced to eight years behind bars at the Texarkana prison in Texas.

It was there that Van Laningham crossed paths with New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello, whose organized crime network spanned the South and into Cuba, where he ran lucrative casinos.

Marcello was particularly bitter to­ward the Kennedys because Bobby, as U.S. Attorney General, had singled him out in his battle against the mob.

Marcello and Van Laningham were assigned to the same cell at Texarkana and developed an unlikely friendship that soon came to the attention of the FBI, which had long suspected the gangster’s involvement in JFK’s death.

The Feds bugged the cells and told Van Laningham to get the crime mob to open up about his past.

“I was in the cell with him for one and a half years – and EVERYTHING was recorded<” said Van Laningham who now lives in Southern California and is acting as a consultant to upcoming biopic “Legacy of Secrecy” that will star Leonardo DiCaprio as Van Laningham and Robert De Niro as Marcello.

“I agreed basically because I thought that the president was the best America ever had. I loved the guy. The FBI heard everything I got from Marcello – and I got EVERYTHING – who planned it, who was involved and who did the murder.”

Marcello’s explosive confession came on Dec. 15, 1987, during an angry tirade about the Kennedy Brothers. Marcello admitted to having the “son of a bitch” killed, adding he was only sorry he didn’t pull the trigger himself.

During his confession, Marcello explained how he met up with Lee Harvey Oswald, whom he’d selected to take the fall for the shooting, as well as his ties to Jack Ruby, the Dallas bar owner who shot Oswald.

Despite his cooperation, Van Laningham says the FBI never did anything with the information. Marcello died in 1993 at age 83.

Jackie Kennedy’s’ first cousin John H. Davis first revealed the sinister plot in his out –of print books “Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy” published in December 1988 and “The Kennedy Contract” 1993.

But now, Van Laningham was tracked down by author Lamar Waldron who details the mob conspiracy in his new book “The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination”.

In the book, Waldron claims that the FBI’s failure to act on the bugged confession was due to an alliance between the U.S. Government and the Mafia to overthrow the Communist regime in Cuba and assassinate Fidel Castro.

Revealing the conspiracy would have involved exposing the U.S. in a possible Cuba coup and “could have triggered World War III in those tense cold war times,” Waldron writes.

With a major international scandal at stake, the FBI was told to quash the black operation.

Meanwhile as The ENQUIRER recently revealed, Oswald did not act alone with a second shooter being a notorious Cuban with ties to the Mafia who fired the grassy knoll.

“This new information finally connects all the dots, tying Marcello to the shooters, to Lee Oswald AND to Jack Ruby,” says Waldron. “What had formerly been a mass of compelling evidence – with a few key parts missing, and some connections murky – now becomes a clear, coherent and concise story of JFK’s murder.”